A fast low-power time-to-voltage converter for high luminosity collider detectors

A novel CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) integrated circuit has been designed to measure the time interval between two digital voltage pulses. The measurement is stored as an analog voltage on a capacitor for later digitization. The targeted range of measurable times is 5-25 ns, with a resolution of 0.5 ns. An additional feature of the circuit is a storage depth of eight samples, i.e. eight consecutive time measurements can be recorded individually. Hence, the chip is a combination of a time-to-voltage converter and an analog memory. >